Franz Cassel

Franz Cassel (1889-) was an Imperial German Army lieutenant who served in the German 99th Reserve Infantry Regiment on the Western Front of World War I.

Biography
Franz Cassel was born in the German Empire to a Jewish family in 1889, and he enlisted in the 143 Reserve-Infanterie Regiment at the start of World War I in 1914. He was first sent to the Eastern Front, surviving dysentery in the winter of 1915 and being wounded twice during battles with the Russians; he was rewarded with a promotion to Lieutenant and was awarded the Iron Cross. While recovering from his wounds in Germany, he married, and he was transferred to the 99 Reserve-Infanterie Regiment in time for the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He commanded a machine-gun unit at Thiepval, repulsing wave after wave of British assaults despite being outnumbered; his platoon suffered nearly 100% losses in the ensuing hand-to-hand combat. Severely wounded, he returned to Germany and served as an officer in the War Department before being discharged in 1919. During the Interwar period, he ran a successful business, but he was stripped of all of his property under Nazi Germany due to his Jewish heritage. He was briefly imprisoned at Dachau before the discovery of his heroism in World War I and a friend's bribe of the camp guards led to his release. He then fled to the United Kingdom, where he was imprisoned as an "enemy alien" for five months during World War II. During the 1950s, the West German government awarded Cassel 150 marks as compensation for his imprisonment during the 1930s, and he spent the rest of his life in the UK, publishing his memoirs from the 1950s to the 1970s.